


dance to the plastic beat (another morning comes)

by spanish_sahara



Series: plastic love [1]
Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post-Persona 5: The Royal, Stalking, Unrequited Love, Voyeurism, would you believe me if i told you that this has a Good Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:40:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26826757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spanish_sahara/pseuds/spanish_sahara
Summary: He doesn’t know how long he stands there, watching Akira make out with a beautiful girl who apparently is also his girlfriend. One of them finally realizes that they should come back up for air, and they separate. He listens to the both of them chuckle, still clutching one another with a small breadth of space between their faces.Goro wants to laugh, too—because he came all this way, through time and space and death itself, just to watch Akira stick his tongue down someone else’s throat.For Akechi Goro, stalking the girlfriend of your former enemy slash rival is a perfectly normal thing to do after returning back from the dead (a second time, mind you).
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist, Minor Kurusu Akira/Togo Hifumi
Series: plastic love [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1973140
Comments: 26
Kudos: 233





	dance to the plastic beat (another morning comes)

**Author's Note:**

> (cw: mild descriptions of gore, mild descriptions of sexual content, stalking & obsessive behavior, voyeurism, descriptions of suicidal ideation, use of misogynistic slurs) 
> 
> title is from "plastic love," by mariya takeuchi, which you should definitely give a listen if you haven't already. please heed the warnings, and enjoy (:

When Goro wakes up, lying face-down in the dirt of an unfinished construction site, his first thought is not of Akira. His very first thought is _Why the fuck is there dirt in my mouth_ , and then, _I bet this is Akira’s fault again_. He blinks the dust out of his eyes, digs in his pockets for his phone, which is miraculously still there and working, and checks the date and time. _14 February 2017, 4:02 PM_. Goro was supposed to have died, along with Maruki’s warped reality, approximately eleven days ago.

Akira _promised_ he would, this time around.

He gets up, heart a dull throb in his chest, and realizes that he is very much alive. Dusting the dirt off his coat and pants, he stalks out of the construction site to see Odaiba as he once remembered it. There is no faint shimmer of technicolor ambience over the air. People are walking around without any disturbing smiles to distort their faces. They are all miserable and mediocre, as they were before Maruki decided to mess with their lives for the sake of his greater good.

Goro sincerely doesn’t know why he’s back in the land of the dreary living, as untouched and undead as he was when he first woke back up. Somehow though, even as he feels like his body is drowning in quicksand, Goro ends up on a train to Yongen-Jaya. An hour later, he is walking briskly towards Leblanc. He figures that he could’ve just texted or called Akira, but a stubborn part of him wants to see him in person, to see his obsidian eyes crack open in shock and wonder at Goro’s miraculous state of living. Akira better have an answer for why he’s here, he thinks darkly to himself as he winds a corner. He has to have an answer because—like the last time he came to with a blank space in his memories—Goro doesn’t have anyone else he can turn to.

He’s about to turn into the street where the coffee shop is when he catches two figures standing outside. He stops to hide himself within the alley of an old building, pulling his scarf more tightly around his neck and face as he watches them. When he focuses his vision against the hazy dusk of evening, he realizes that one of the figures is Akira. He’s dressed less shabbily than he usually is, in a long, dark coat and turtleneck that cuts starkly against the soft lines of the girl in front of him. A girl, whose face Akira is cradling between his hands with a clear tenderness, who is staring back at him with dark, pretty eyes, who seems, disgustingly enough, _in love._

They’re both murmuring something to each other, sweet nothings, Goro’s sure, even if he can’t quite hear through the white noise sputtering in his ears. Possessiveness curdles inside of him, sour and sharp, as he watches the girl press herself up on her toes to tilt her lips against Akira’s, her palms gripping his chest. It’s a deep and intimate kiss, one obviously intended to be hidden away from the public eye, but Goro can’t tear his gaze away, mouth dry as Akira takes off his glasses to kiss her deeper, to thread her in more closely through the long strands of her hair. He doesn’t know how long he stands there, watching Akira make out with a beautiful girl who apparently is also his girlfriend. One of them finally realizes that they should come back up for air, and they separate. He listens to the both of them chuckle, still clutching one another with a small breadth of space between their faces.

Goro wants to laugh, too—because he came all this way, through time and space and death itself, just to watch Akira stick his tongue down someone else’s throat.

“I should be getting home,” he hears Akira’s girlfriend say in her soft, girly voice. “But this was a lovely evening. Thank you, Akira.”

“Of course, Hifumi,” Akira says. He smooths a hand over her face and presses one last chaste kiss to her cheek. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

The fine thread of Goro’s sanity abruptly snaps at that. He came back to life on _Valentine’s Day_. He came back to life on the societally acknowledged day of love, and the first person he wanted to see was fucking Kurusu Akira, out of all people—out of all people, because there was no one else that gripped Goro’s heart as forcibly and immediately as Akira did. He wants to scream. He wants to tear his hair out at how fitting this all fucking is, how a day of love that Goro would’ve never celebrated otherwise due to its material sense of propaganda and marketing is now being co-opted from him by some stranger _bitch_. He wants to die all over again.

No, _no_ , he thinks to himself, viciously, and his consciousness starts to piece back together again in rough, jagged pieces. If he stopped here, then that would mean Akira won. What Akira exactly would win, he wasn’t sure—but Goro needed a fucking win for once in his life, goddammit, and if that meant taking Akira’s relationship and shooting a thousand bullets into it, then he would do it. It’s not like he had anything else to do, he thinks distantly, with his former job as a mind-murdering assassin no longer in demand.

He takes one last glance at Akira, waving goodbye to the girl with a stupid, dopey look on his face, and then slips away.

—

Goro goes back to his apartment. It seems that it wasn’t on the list of Shido’s assets that got liquified—everything is as it was when Goro last left it, clean and dusty and devoid of any objects signifying the place as Goro’s, save for the second-hand jazz records scattered across the ground, along with remnants of old paperwork. He sets his keys and wallets down on the table next to the front door, grabs a can of Sapporo from his fridge, and sinks down to the floor of his living room. After all this time, he’d still neglected to get actual furniture, other than his bed and desk.

As he takes a long gulp of beer, he contemplates the rage simmering furiously in his bloodstream. It’s not like he and Akira were anything more to each other than mortal enemies, Goro reflects. Or temporary allies, or rivals who liked to play chess and billiards and innocuous gun-fighter games with one another, or the last two people not brainwashed by a psychological apocalypse, whatever they called that. Truthfully, he used to keep the label of his and Akira’s relationship in a deep, dark corner of his depraved mind that he only receded to when he would think about how Akira’s stupidly fluffy hair would make something in his heart stutter, or about why on earth he shared overly detailed accounts from his hopelessly tragic backstory to Akira as they sat naked in a bathhouse together.

Goro didn’t believe that he was _in love_ with Akira, the way his simpering girlfriend appeared to be. He didn’t think he was capable of it, if he was being honest with himself. But there was something very singular about what they were to each other, something that courted and defied death itself. Whatever Akira was to him, it was more to him than a silly teenaged relationship where they held one other and blushed as they squished their faces together. Goro wanted to do things to him—again, things secretly collected in that dark, swampy corner of Goro’s headspace—that his little girlfriend would probably never dream of doing to her precious, sweet Akira.

Thinking more on it, he’s a bit peeved off. Akira didn’t even respect him enough to fool around with someone who Goro at least _knows_. He could’ve picked the model, or the student-council president, or the billionaire brat, or the hacker girl, or God forbid _Yoshizawa_ , who seemed closer to a little sister with an inappropriate crush than a fuck buddy. Hell, he could’ve fucked the starving artist boy—who was admittedly pretty, but _not_ prettier than Goro—and even he would’ve been better. He refused to consider the possibility that Akira’s tastes would’ve proved deplorable enough that he would stoop to sleeping with Sakamoto, out of all people.

But her—a complete and utter stranger, who is begrudgingly attractive, who smiles demurely at Akira, whose long hair cascades through Akira’s dexterous hands, whose meticulously detailed backstory he doesn’t even have stored away in his old detective files, in case of emergencies like this.

He takes a heavier pull of his drink and looks up at the muted colors of his ceiling. Goro has his work cut out for him, it seems.

—

He spends the next few days researching Togo Hifumi, age 17. Incoming third-year at the prestigious Kosei High. Professional shogi player and part-time model. Father is hospitalized, mother is an apparent leech. Took a short hiatus in her career last year for personal reasons, but started again in early December. He found her by stalking Akira’s social media in private, but it doesn’t take a detective to see why she is the picture-perfect girlfriend for fellow 17-year-old Kurusu Akira—sharp enough to warrant his attention, but mind-numbingly ordinary enough for his youthful sensibilities to handle.

Goro finds a recent interview of her online, bookmarked towards the beginning of February, where she is asked about all sorts of inane things: her hobbies, her favorite places to eat in Shibuya, her biggest aspirations in life. When the reporter finally asks if Togo is dating anyone at the moment, a blush darkens her cheeks, briefly. Her eyes flit to the camera in an unintended break of character in her cool-girl demeanor—a rookie move, Goro thinks, unimpressed—as she answers, still faintly red, “Yes _._ ”

Of course, this sends the reporter into a frenzy as she begins to grill Togo about her mysterious partner’s name, school, looks, social security number. Togo says nothing at first, hands fidgeting in her lap, before beginning to speak again, more firmly.

“He’s in my year,” she says. She keeps her eyes level to the camera, a seemingly renewed bit of strength steeling her voice as she continues on. “He’s very kind, and studious, and completely supportive of my dream to become a professional shogi player. He makes me want to be better each day, and I’m so grateful to have him in my life.”

Goro refrains from vomiting.

“Oh, how absolutely _adorable_ ,” the reporter croons, apparently star-struck at the concept of two teenagers getting their virginal jollies on for the first time. “How did the two of you meet?”

“He approached me in a church and requested that I teach him shogi,” Togo says, as if this is a perfectly normal occurrence. Akira was so fucking weird. And, Goro thinks darkly, he was supposed to be into _chess_. Goro did not toil evening after evening, sitting across from him in Leblanc to patiently manipulate him into liking it and only playing it with Goro, for him to secretly end up being a bigger fan of _shogi_ after all this time. “He was very novice at first, but then he came to be the inspiration for many of my new moves thereafter. When I met him, I noticed that he had a unique gambler’s spirit to him that enabled him to pull off a variety of tricky plays.”

“Ah, so it was love at first match, then?”

Togo chuckles lightly. “Not quite,” she says. “For a while, we were simply shogi partners and would occasionally see each other outside of our games. He actually just asked me out last month.” How droll—she neglected to mention Akira’s time spent in a juvenile detention center.

“My, my, how romantic! What perfect timing, with Valentine’s Day just on the horizon. It’s also so fascinating to hear how your boyfriend got into shogi because of you, too. It’s almost as if all those hours playing against you, you pushing him constantly, him evolving with you, made him fall in love with you, piece by piece—”

Goro thumbs something on his phone, rewinds.

“All those hours playing against you, you pushing him constantly, him evolving with you—"

And again.

“You pushing him constantly, him evolving with you—"

He could see himself easily in her place, being interviewed by the same vapid reporter. _Please, Akechi-san, tell us how you fell for the dangerous, elusive leader of the Phantom Thieves!_ she would beg him, all but shoving the microphone under his nose. He would give his perfectly pitched T.V. laugh and politely take the mic from her, and say, _Well, Reporter-san, we pushed each somewhat relentlessly until it became a game of sorts. It was wonderfully thrilling, having someone challenge and inspire you to be better as much as he did. He crept up on me in ways that I would’ve never anticipated in my most elaborate predictions. Why, as a matter of fact, I didn’t even realize I fell for him until the game had swallowed me whole and spat me out like a glob of black ooze, until I saw him wiggle his tongue down the throat of that shogi-playing cunt, right next to that stupid run-down coffee shop where he swore to me that he would honor our deal to one another, and I believed him like the fucking imbecile I am—_

He clicks out of the tab. Closes his laptop. When he looks down, he realizes his hands are painfully clenched against his thighs. As the blood in his legs constricts, he stares at the faint protrusion of his veins ebbing beneath his skin, the glaring reminder that he is here and warm and very painfully alive, until the numbness in his chest dissipates.

—

As frustratingly unreadable as Akira could be, there were some things about him that were clear to Goro as he slowly got to know him over the course of last year.

  1. He was dangerous, as all quiet ones were. When he first saw Akira get picked out by that T.V. producer, he thought nothing of him, just another shaggy-haired boy with glasses too big for his pale face. When he heard Akira speak in a quiet but undeniably declarative tone about his belief in the illustrious Phantom Thieves, his interest was piqued. And when he extended his hand out to Akira for the very first time, and Akira had taken it firmly, without reticence, resolve shining in the liquid measure of his eyes, Goro knew that there was more to him than he’d initially assessed.  
  

  2. He would do anything for his friends. _Anything_. Akira bent over backwards to soothe and attend to all of their worries, whether it be Kitagawa’s sporadic blocks of artistic creativity, or Nijima’s fumbling insecurities—somehow, he always knew the right word or turn of phrase to act as a balm for their litany of teenage traumas and dilemmas, and every time he did it, throwing himself into the world’s problems without a second thought for himself, they grew more and more stalwart in their loyalty to both Joker and the boy smiling underneath the mask. If you wanted to truly get through the shifting layers of Kurusu Akira, you had to threaten the people that he loved—even someone as cloying and kind as Maruki had understood that and had sought to use it against him.  
  

  3. He wanted to fuck Goro—even if he refused to ever voice that aloud. Because as much as a nice, unassuming boy Kurusu Akira liked to be, charming the entire city of Tokyo with his artfully messy hair, his benign, glasses-clad gaze, and his endless accumulation of quaint part-time jobs, nice boys didn’t become nationally wanted criminals that operated in the shadows of the supernatural world. Nice boys didn’t wield daggers, pistols, and all sorts of lethal weaponry with that kind of fatal dexterity, tearing into the flesh of monsters with boundless, infectious joy. And nice boys simply didn’t _look_ at Goro like that—like they possessed the same, wretched desires as Goro did, like they were itching to hit back just as soon as Goro threw the first punch, like they wanted to kiss the delicate underside of Goro’s hands, right underneath the thin fabric of his gloves.



  
  
—

One evening, Goro stalks Akira and Togo out on one of their dates, because this is what his life has become. He trails Akira from Yongen-Jaya to Shibuya Station, sequestered beneath the daily ebb and flow of Tokyo’s hard-working salary slaves in a boring, nondescript outfit. He manages to hide himself behind a magazine swiped from the nearest section of job postings as Akira waits by a vending machine, idly checking his phone. When Togo arrives, with a red bow that ties her hair back neatly, Akira’s face lights up in its Akira way, endearing and subtle and all too capable of making any lovestruck fool feel special. Goro would know, because Akira had looked like that each time he saw Goro sitting at Leblanc’s bar.

He offers his arm to Togo, who smiles graciously and takes it. They weave their way through the crowd, eventually transferring over to the Chuuou line. Goro stays a measurable distance from them on the train, grey knit scarf tucked around his face. His eyes flicker to and from them, glancing dispassionately at how Togo’s legs are pressed up against Akira’s as they sit next to one another, how Akira links his hand with hers, sweeping his thumb over her wrist. It’s more than enough affection to make Goro want to both whip his head away and keep his eyes glued to the careful, deliberate connection of their skin.

They go from the station at Kichijoji to the bustling commercial area, and then finally, with Goro freezing in his steps as the crowd moves around him, to Jazz Jin. It looks just as he remembered it, charmingly unassuming, framed by old, crumbling bricks, with stairs leading down to a low-lit room and the comforting scratch of music on a vinyl player. Why did Akira take his girlfriend here, Goro thinks, despairingly, as he watches the two of them disappear down the stairs. Rationally, he knew Akira had taken his other friends here privately after Goro took him for the first time—but this instance feels different, like Akira took her here to silently gloat at Goro, to shit on Goro’s memory by taking his girlfriend to the places Goro used to keep stowed away in his heart secretively, greedily.

He doesn’t go in because even underneath the scarf and shabby attire, Muhen will recognize him from years of serving Goro drinks and music recommendations as he hunched over his work at a table. With a pang in his chest, he moves his stakeout to a roadside bar across the street, scrolling through his phone aimlessly as he waits for them to emerge. He doesn’t know how long he spends reading useless shit on the Internet and glaring away anyone who tries to speak to him, until he sees Akira’s familiar mop of hair emerge, along with Togo. His arm is wrapped around her shoulders as he guides them back into the street. Swearing, Goro throws some yen down on the counter and resumes following them from afar, now made easier with the sky a haze of darkness above them.

Goro observes how Akira leans into her ear to whisper something that makes her blush and whip her hand out at him. He catches it with ease, the beginnings of Joker’s smirk on his face, and then uses his leverage to pull her deeper into a darkened alleyway off the roadside. His heart pounding in a rough, staccato beat, Goro sneaks to the side of where they’ve hidden themselves away from the crowd, straining to hear and catch a glimpse of what they’re doing in the shadows.

“Akira,” he hears Togo’s voice say, entreating. She must be scared of how surreptitious the whole situation feels. How boring.

“If you’re uncomfortable, then we can go back,” Akira says, because he is Akira. “But you look beautiful, and I want to touch you.”

It’s cliché, saccharine bullshit, so of course it makes Togo wrap her arms around his neck and slant her lips against Akira’s once more. This time, though, she seems to be the one leading Akira, turning them so he’s pressed against the wall, with his legs bracketing her petite frame. Akira lets himself be manhandled around—as Goro knew he would, fuck—and even with the darkness covering them, Goro can see the movements of his hands over Togo’s body. He hears the faint snap of buttons, the long throw of Togo’s coat being pulled open, and a small gasp from her as Akira works his hands deftly over the softness of her curves, his voice a quiet murmur in the air as he coaxes her into bitten off silence. It’s literally the most censured, straight bullshit that Goro has ever had the misfortune of witnessing ever since he first discovered porn—but there’s a cavernous flash of desire working in the pit of his stomach, growing deeper and deeper as he listens to the deft movements of Akira’s hands, as he sees how Akira’s hips roll languidly into Togo, against the line of separation between their clothing.

For a moment of pure hormonal idiocy, he wishes that it were less dark, so he could see Akira’s pupils blown wide with open lust, how much paler his skin looked with the hot flush of blood against it. Better yet, he wishes that he could dig his hands into Togo’s skull, and then press his warm and bloody fingers into Akira’s mouth, prying open his lips to steal a kiss, tongue darting out to stroke and lap up the gory mess he would leave behind.

Goro is listening to Akira finger his girlfriend in an alleyway with murder in his heart and his cock straining against his zipper. He is listening to Akira whisper filthy nothings against Togo’s skin, his hand working between her stockings, the muffled, wet sounds of her desire in the air, only privy to Akira and her and Goro, whose hands are shaking so badly that his gloves feel like they’re about to rip at the seams. 

He finds the clarity to still them as he hears Akira and Togo gather themselves again, rearranging their clothes back to a less disheveled state. Goro bleeds back into his own hiding spot as they emerge, arms linked, back into the crowds of Kichijoji. Their laughter strikes at something hollow in his chest as he watches them skip away like thieves into the night. Akira casts one last look back at the alley, barely glancing over Goro’s hidden form, his happiness mischievous and buoyant.

He takes the train home, alone.

—

Truthfully, Goro doesn’t know what his plan is.

His original intention was to just stalk Akira and his girlfriend, learn the most intimate parts of their relationship, and then ruin it all by reinserting himself forcibly into Akira’s life like the onset of a virus. He had also been curious about if Akira had really loved the girl, if he had just said _Yes_ to being with her because he didn’t know how to answer otherwise—this, Goro had yet to determine. If he didn’t love her, Akira certainly seemed like he enjoyed fucking her, in dingy street alleys, in her undoubtedly pristine bedroom, in the cramped, shitty attic he temporarily called home. Goro had heard him say as much, when he was panting his dogged desires out against her neck as he thrust into her, in the public laundromat of all places, once again shrouded in the layers of nighttime. It actually wasn’t surprising that Akira was such a shameless exhibitionist—it was more surprising that mild-mannered Togo Hifumi seemed just as enthusiastic and reciprocal about it.

There is a small—okay, not small—part of Goro that wishes he could still just slip into this girl’s mind, wreak some havoc, and then watch pleasantly from the sidelines as her physical body collapses and implodes in front of Akira’s eyes. It’s certainly Goro’s preferred modus operandi—it was so much more efficient to tear apart minds than it was to slowly pick them apart, to learn them. Akira was the sole exception to that.

But dying and spending the last month running around with a rag-tag group of super-powered teenagers tends to change one’s mindset on a variety of moral questions, and Goro is trying to be a marginally better person now, even if he misses Loki like a physical ache in his soul. He spends his days tailing Akira and his girlfriend on their bland, heterosexual dates, and he spends his nights counting slowly to 10 as he suppresses the visceral urge to murder her and splatter the blood of her pretty little head all over his cashmere coat. Most of the time, when this urge rolls around, he just jerks himself off to the thought of what Akira would look like if Goro ever revealed his presence in the middle of him fucking Togo, how his hips would stumble and stutter while inside of her, how Goro would walk up to him, caress his face with a lover’s touch in one glove-clad hand, and quietly order him to finish.

Baby steps.

—

After another day spent stalking Akira and his girlfriend on their date in Akihabara, rain begins to pour all around Tokyo. Goro gets into a cab to avoid having to deal with the mess from the train station, and his blood runs cold when he sees the driver.

“Akechi-kun,” says Maruki Takuto, twisting around to look at him. He tips his hat. “So nice to see you again.”

“Fuck you, I’m leaving,” Goro says immediately, and kicks open the door. When he steps one of his legs out, rain washes over his pants and soaks the material through. It was his favorite pair of corduroy slacks, too, he thinks, fists clenched at his sides. He takes a look back at the smiling bastard in the front seat, hands patiently on the steering wheel as a seeming sign of benevolence, and he curses whatever God’s sick fucking sense of humor landed him in a cab with a therapist.

“It’s awfully stormy out there,” says Maruki.

“Shut up,” Goro snaps on instinct. He glances back down at his rapidly dampening pants— _corduroy,_ he laments—and then slides back in and slams the door shut. “Fine. Drive. Shibuya Station Square.” He makes no effort to hide his vicious glare, but Maruki simply nods, steering them back out into the busy street with a faint hum under his breath. The radio crackles with old 80s music, the sound of Mariya Takeuchi’s voice in the air. A rare sense of nostalgia burns in him. It was one of the few records he owned from his mother’s late collection.

“So, how have you—"

“Before you say anything,” Goro interrupts, voice perfectly level, “I want you to know that I absolutely despise you. You were a failure as a student counselor, as a therapist, as an academic researcher, and as an enemy of the Phantom Thieves. Your ideals are the incompetent, megalomaniac musings of a man who has spent his entire career spouting sentimental horseshit. Your life will peter out to a small grain of existence, and you will die, as forgotten and unloved as you were when you were born.” Goro pauses. “And your hat makes you look like a cross between a train conductor and an old, decrepit pervert.”

Maruki’s smile seems to falter for a bit, before his eyes crinkle again at the corners, twitching slightly. “I can see why Kurusu-kun liked you so much,” he says. “So honest.”

The mention of Akira makes Goro’s skin crawl. _Well-played, Maruki_. He sneers in response, crossing his arms against his chest, and looks sullenly out the window.

“Well, allow me to tell you how glad I am to see you,” Maruki says, forging on ahead even with Goro’s hostility. “I would … apologize for everything that’s happened in the last month or so, but I doubt that those words would hold any weight with you.”

“You’re almost right,” Goro says. “Nothing you say, apology or not, holds any weight with me.”

“And you are absolutely entitled to feeling that way,” Maruki agrees easily.

“If the rest of this taxi ride will consist of agonizing small talk, I’d rather we both just shut the fuck up.”

“I actually think that this is a wondrously fortunate opportunity to sort through some things, on both our ends,” Maruki says. “Out of curiosity, have you told Kurusu-kun that you’re alive?”

Goro is silently seething, which seems to be enough of an answer for Maruki. He merely hums in response as he taps his fingers against the car’s dashboard. “I can see why you chose to do that,” he says, thoughtful. “Have you been waiting for the right time?”

More like he’d been waiting for Akira and his girlfriend to achieve peak happiness in their relationship so that he could bludgeon it open with a sledgehammer. “I suppose so,” he instead replies, still refusing to meet Maruki’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“I’m sure Kurusu-kun would be ecstatic to discover that you’re alive,” Maruki says. “He mentioned you frequently in our former counseling sessions together. He left your name out, of course, but I was able to make some deductions on my own. While conflicted about the nature of your relationship, Kurusu-kun seemed awfully attached to you and would spend much of our time bringing up moments from when the two of you were together. I could’ve only imagined how devastated he was when he saw what happened to you in that Palace, Akechi-kun."

“You shouldn’t have brought me back,” Goro says quietly. He doesn’t want to hear this. He doesn’t want to hear how Akira had mourned for him like a widow during wartime, when he now had a perfectly stable girlfriend to fill in the spaces of his grief, and Goro just had his empty apartment and sad music and a growing collection of empty beer cans. “You just made things more complicated than they ever needed to be.”

“From what it sounds like,” says Maruki, carefully, “you don’t think you should’ve survived whatever happened to you, do you?”

 _What the fuck do you think_ , Goro wants to snarl at him. His fingernails are biting dark crescents into the cushion of his seat.

Maruki considers him again in the mirror, his eyes bright behind his glasses. The genuine compassion reflected on his face swells Goro with a bottomless rage, and he wants to tear Maruki’s glasses away, to flay the sincerity off his skin, just so he can stop looking like—like—

“Do you feel like you deserve to live, Akechi-kun?”

The question is a shot to the spine all over again.

“I—” he starts, and whatever he wants to say is tangled up like a bundle of vines in his throat.

“I’m sorry, that must have been too forward of me,” Maruki says, far more gently. “What I mean to say is that your reluctance with telling Kurusu-kun about your survival, your confusion at the unknown circumstances that led to this, your anger at the mere fact of you being here, seem to stem from your inherent belief that you’re not worthy of the life you possess.”

“How do you even know it’s mine,” Goro hears himself reply in short, terse syllables, almost as if the words are ripping themselves through him.

“I can’t say for certain why you’re here, this time around,” muses Maruki. “It was my timely interference in the Metaverse that allowed you to survive the circumstances of your first death. However, the effects of my Persona’s powers should’ve dissipated when you and the Phantom Thieves defeated me in my Palace. By all accounts, you should’ve died, yes, or faded away like the others who were born from that ideal reality—however, as I’m sure you’re well-aware of from your own familiarity with the workings of the Metaverse, cognition is a tricky phenomenon. Perhaps it found something within you that you’d overlooked.”

“And what exactly would that be, _Doctor_ Maruki?”

“Maybe your will to live ended up being stronger than your will to die,” Maruki says softly. “Maybe the deciding factor between you living or dying wasn’t the choice of Kurusu-kun, but yours, after all.”

Goro blinks, slowly. _Wasn’t the choice of Kurusu-kun, but yours, after all_. Maruki says the words with the gentle politeness of a knife in the belly, carving out his guts and letting the viscera rot and spill between them. “Horseshit,” he rasps out, even as his hand grips his stomach, trying to hold in the bloody remnants of his insides. “You don’t know fucking anything about me, Maruki.”

“Perhaps,” Maruki says, humming again. He turns into a street opening. “In your words, these could simply be the—what was it? ‘The incompetent, megalomaniac musings’ of an old, tired man.”

He thankfully lapses into silence after that, leaving Goro to listen numbly to the pitter-pattering of the rain, and the same, crackling song on the radio until the car slows to a stop in front of the station.

“Well, it looks like we’ve arrived,” Maruki says cheerfully, turning back to look at Goro. Just as Goro is about to bolt out of the car and away from this fucking lunatic, he places an apple into his hands. “Have a little snack before you go—a small token of gratitude for letting me speak with you like this, Akechi-kun.”

“I hate you,” Goro says, vehemently, as he slides out and kicks the car door shut behind him.

“Oh, and I won’t tell Kurusu-kun or the others you’re alive, out of respect for your wishes,” Maruki calls out.

“That would be the first time you’ve done so,” Goro snarls back, and he stalks away in the rain, clothes be damned. He crushes and squelches the fruit in his fists, even as the juice runs messily down the pristine cloth of his gloves.

—

Fuck Maruki Takuto, fuck his apples, and especially fuck his pathetic attempts at good faith and compassion after using a rusty screwdriver to pry open Goro’s life. He doesn’t have the time to wonder whether or not he was here because he decided after 18 years of a shitty, hate-fueled existence, living was a worthwhile endeavor. It was time, instead, for Goro to actually set his plan into motion and meet Togo Hifumi himself.

He sets out for the Christian church in Kanda, nose scrunching as he steps into the haunting, arched halls of the chapel. Togo has no inkling as to his relationship with Akira, or lack thereof, so he feels comfortable revealing himself to her as she sits before a shogi board in the first board, a serious, contemplative look on her face.

Togo’s eyes peer up at him in recognition. “Ah, Akechi-san,” she says politely. “It’s nice to see you again. I remember you from our time spent briefly in the TV station together. I hope you’ve been doing well.”

For the life of him, Goro literally cannot recall that, but that’s fine. “It’s a pleasure to see you again as well, Togo-san,” he says with a wide, bright smile that hurts his cheeks from lack of use. “The same to you.”

“What brings you here?”

“Actually, I was wondering if I could trouble you for a brief match, since I heard that you practiced in the church so often,” Goro says, straining to keep the pitch of his voice high and light. “I’m more of a casual chess player myself, but shogi is just as fascinating in theory—I would love to practice my strategizing skills with you here, if you have the time.”

“Oh, I typically don’t practice with others in the church,” she says. Goro is ready to strangle her, right here in front of God, but then she continues on, “However, my boyfriend has encouraged me to seek as many playing partners as I can to further expand my knowledge and skills. I’d be happy to indulge you in a match or two, for my own selfishness as well. Please sit, and I’ll reset the board for us.”

“Thank you very much,” Goro says, his teeth clenched still in that aggravatingly polite smile. He sits next to her in the pew, a careful distance away from her. “Your boyfriend sounds very friendly.”

“He can actually be a bit of a tease,” Togo replies, with a soft chuckle, as she arranges the board set-up. “He says that I play by myself alone so much that one day I’ll eventually grow delirious and start treating other people like shogi pieces themselves.”

“Haha, how funny of him.” Maybe Goro won’t end up killing her—maybe God will smite him and end his pitiful life, here and now, just like he’s always wanted. “If you could, would you mind keeping this match between us our little secret as well? I’m keeping my public appearances to a minimum right now, so I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t let this slip to anyone else. Even your boyfriend,” he tacks on at the end for good measure. He hopes it doesn’t sound as hasty as it came out—he was very out of practice, talking to people like this.

“Of course, I understand how vital privacy can be,” Togo says, nodding cluelessly. She brings her arms back to her sides, and then she bows towards him, ever so slightly. “Allow us to begin.”

They play out the next few turns. Goro thinks they’re going to play in silence, but Togo starts murmuring nonsense about fairy knights and shogun generals and beautiful mistresses at war, each time she moves a piece on the board. This is the girl that Akira is choosing to fuck, he thinks, inwardly sighing.

Togo wins—more quickly than Goro would’ve liked, but he wasn’t paying the game much attention to begin with—and immediately begins to reset the pieces to their original positions. “Shall we proceed with another match?” she asks, almost shyly. “You’re an interesting player. Novice at the game, but I can tell that you have experience with strategizing quickly and accurately attacking your opponent’s weaknesses.”

Amongst other talents, Goro thinks.

He laughs sheepishly into his hand. “It’s flattering to hear a player as talented as yourself say that,” he says. “I have to say though, I don’t know anyone in our age group who would be as adept and passionate about this game as you are. Tell me, do you have any tips I can keep in mind for our next match?”

Togo deliberates for a moment, hand paused over one of the pawn pieces, before beginning to speak again in that strange, fantastical tone. “One of the most useful lessons I learned in shogi was that in order to escape an unfavorable situation, you must carve out your own path, unknowable to anyone else but yourself, as unyielding and resilient as a general forging his way ahead on the battlefield.” She switches the pieces up on the board with a fierce, quick elegance. “Beginning players will learn by the book at first, but as they grow more proficient at the game, they learn to take inspiration from the world around them and apply the same creativity to the board, which is also an ever-changing and evolving object. Stagnancy is death for a shogi player. Or for anyone, I suppose.” She finishes resetting the game, and then looks up, startled, as if remembering Goro is there. “Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to have rambled on in thought—I hope I wasn’t boring you. Are you ready, Akechi-san?”

Goro didn’t realize that his smile had dropped until he looks back up at her, her face expressing gentle, surprised concern. “Oh, yes, sorry about that—that’s a very intriguing line of thought, I was mulling it over myself,” he says, and allows his doll’s face to tug back into place. He robotically begins his turn. “It’s just peculiar, what you said about stagnancy and death.”

“Mm, I suppose shogi is different in that way from chess,” Togo says, eyes glued to the board. “In traditional chess, my understanding is that once a piece is taken, it’s out of the game. But in shogi, captured pieces turn over to your opponent’s and can often complicate your tactics significantly as a result. Roles between kings and queens and pawns can shift as easily as still water.”

“How poetic,” Goro says, and keeps the sharpness of his teeth tucked away in his smile. “So if you’re unable to adapt to the ever-transformative nature of the game, then the inevitability of your loss is clear.”

“I’ve seen many opponents falter because they stumble back into the same strategies they’ve always had,” Togo says. “So yes, it’s as you said—loss is the only destination your path will arrive at when you’ve stopped trying to find a new one, or you’ve failed to acknowledge how even your own surroundings have transformed. It’s a rather overused metaphor, I suppose, but it works for the purposes of the game.”

Goro nods mutely and plays the rest of the game out in silence, his fingers turning the pieces over rigidly with every move, listening to Togo mutter on and on about dragons and dragon-knights and damsels hidden away in towers. When the game finally reaches its conclusion, he thanks her and makes an excuse about having to finish up his work at home.

“Alright, then,” Togo says. “It was a pleasure playing with you, Akechi-san.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” Goro says without inflection. He stands, brushing imaginary dust off his slacks, and stares down at her demure frame, her tactician’s hands that Goro wants to grip between his own, to see if they’re as soft against his own skin as they are against Akira’s. He suppresses the urge, and instead merely says, “You’re very wise, Togo-san. Your boyfriend must be very grateful to have someone like you in his life.”

“Oh, that’s so kind of you to say,” Togo says, smiling. “I’m grateful to have someone like him in my life as well.”

“… I wish you the joy of him.” He bows stiffly and begins to turn away, just as mild curiosity passes through her face. “Goodbye.”

—

Once upon a time, a boy met his very first friend, so very lonely and clever like him, and then months later, he killed him.

What happened between those two points is unimportant. After the boy killed his friend, it turns out that he didn’t really kill him at all, and that his friend, even after being pretend-murdered, still wanted to be his friend. This naturally confused the boy, of course, but it didn’t really matter in the end anyway, because the boy was eventually killed by another nastier and even more murderous version of himself. His friend wished him back to life. And then, despite his friend pouring all of his kindness and warmth and hope into him, the boy died again. Or, he was supposed to, but one day, the boy came back, a final time, this time without his friend even knowing, his friend who found a girl to keep his own loneliness company—and now, the boy keeps waking up every day to the same sick, repeating gag toiling over and over in his head, like a broken record player, the vinyl scratched and worn-out.

Goro’s beer has grown lukewarm against his chest. He doesn’t know how long he’s been lying there, or when he put on the music in the background either—“Plastic Love,” his mother’s favorite record, is spinning somewhere in the apartment.

He hasn’t stalked Akira or Togo Hifumi in days. Goro thinks that he’s probably fucking her somewhere right now, undoubtedly in another clandestine area beneath the notice of the public consciousness. Goro can’t find it in him to summon the familiar hot flare of rage and murderous intent whenever he normally thinks about Akira fucking his girlfriend into a wall. His head is too full of other tepid memories of a boy and his friend and all the lost time between them, slipping away like sand down an hourglass.

He wants to hunt down Maruki and shake him and ask, _Who the fuck did you think you were, telling me that I wanted to live and not even bothering to tell me_ why? Goro was meticulous, manipulative, and frighteningly intelligent—he had planned his revenge against Shido for years, and yet he had never stopped to think about what came after he pulled the curtain down over that bald bastard and revealed him for the piece of shit he was. University, maybe, get a degree, get a job—the possibility of something so bland and ordinary as _that_ belonging in Goro’s life, after all that he did, after the person he became, makes him want to break out into hysterics. There was only one thing he wanted when he woke up again, face down in gravel and dirt—but the object of his desires was off being happy and youthful and maybe in love, the kind of thing that normal teenagers like him deserved.

 _Do you feel like you deserve to live, Akechi-kun_?

Or maybe it wasn’t a matter of deserving after all—back on that day, when he had stared Akira down in Leblanc and snapped at him to _let him go_ , he didn’t choose to stand against Maruki and his disgustingly fake reality because he thought that he deserved to die. He chose to fight Maruki because he was so very tired of having his life manipulated by people more powerful than him, and if death was the olive branch he had to take to secure his own tenuous sense of agency, then he would take it.

Back on that day, Goro picked death over a lifetime of engaging in ordinary teenage shenanigans, of sitting in coffee shops and playing chess with his friends, of letting, one day, in the dusty corner of an attic, let Akira tell Goro that he loved him. He chose death because it was the only way out of the wretched, tangled web he’d woven for himself. Akira’s love never could have saved him from that.

Well, he thinks—and his consciousness winds back, snaps cleanly back into place as if remembering for the first time—this has never been a story about _love_ , anyways.

—

“Another path,” he mouths to himself, and hears it echo back from the hollow spaces of his home. He feels the ghost of Loki, of Robin Hood, wrap around his skin like a forgotten memory, like a reminder that there was still something stirring inside of him that still craved freedom, rebellion, refusing to die, after all this time.

—

Goro spends the next week of March preparing. He negotiates a termination of his leasing contract to his landlord, who is still so leery over any associate of Shido that he immediately relents. He packs his spare, necessary belongings into a single briefcase. He throws the rest of his apartment’s shit out. He stops by Jazz Jin, one last time, lingering outside its brick walls, listening to the faint drawl of the singer below, and leaves a box of his mother’s old records at the entrance down the stairs. He takes a cab back home, after checking the identity of the driver, and watches the neon fervor of the city lights dance and flicker around him.

On the morning of March 20, 2017, Goro leaves Tokyo.

As he walks to his train stop, he deliberates over one last series of messages on his phone before clicking _Send_ and depositing it discretely into a trash can. His new phone—untraceable, with all former contacts erased—sits heavily in his jacket pocket, alongside a one-way ticket flying him out of the country. Briefcase in hand, he gets onto the train and takes a seat next to the window. If he happens to catch a glimpse of black hair, dark eyes in another compartment, just before he steps onto his train, then he allows the thought to wash over him, to ebb away and away until just the faint ghost of it remains.

If he feels the tendrils of hope snaking their way through his chest, then he lets the feeling come to him and thread itself into his skin until that’s all he can feel, this stupid, winding strand of hope, pulling him farther and farther away from here, from Tokyo, from the city where he was born against all odds, where his mother raised him and died, where he first awakened to his Personas, where he met the boy who would come to be his creation and ruin all at once.

As the plane rushes into the air, Goro takes his glove off and presses the pad of his finger lightly under his wrist’s pulse, a steady murmur beating beneath his skin. He carefully tugs it back on, dropping his face back into his hand as he stares out the window, watching Japan disappear and metamorphose into the lurid vastness of the sky.

—

**(9:30 AM)**

**Goro:** ~~Hey~~.  
 **Goro:** ~~Goodbye, again.~~  
 **Goro:** ~~I never got to say it last time.~~ ~~  
~~**Goro:** ~~Your hair still looks stupid.  
~~ **Goro:** ~~Your girlfriend is passably skilled at shogi.  
~~ **Goro:** ~~You’re not as quiet as you think you are when you’re fucking.~~  
 **Goro:** ~~Enjoy the rest of your pleasant, ordinary, hopelessly boring life.  
~~ **Goro:** ~~You kept our promise.  
~~ **Goro:** ~~… Thank you, for being my first ever friend.~~  
 **Goro:** […]  
 **Goro:** I’m alive, asshole.   
**Goro:** Don’t text me back.

—

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> \-- goro voice: i lived bitch
> 
> \-- some notes on this, conceptually: this was SUPPOSED to be a fic about goro being jealous and obsessive after he finds out about akira dating someone, a la the romantic confidant. however, it kinda got away from me and turned more into wondering how goro would cope with being brought back a second time, with the caveat that akira isn't emotionally/romantically available to help him. do i think goro has found a tangible answer to his existential dilemma by the end of the fic? honestly, no -- but i think leaving akira behind, and leaving tokyo behind, has set him on a path where he could hypothetically find it, at least within the scope this fic has offered. i like to think of those last series of texts as his way of allowing both he and akira some kind of minimal closure. 
> 
> \-- i've literally written so much akeshu/shuake in the past few weeks, but with irl life getting more hectic, we'll see if it slows down hahahahhahaha (: i made a [twitter](https://twitter.com/span1shsahara) to scour the fandom for more content in the meantime, so you can follow if you want!
> 
> \-- as always, please leave a kudos/comment if you enjoyed.


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